Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Jewish Family Christmas

My father, who is 100 percent Jewish, has always been obsessed with Christmas. He grew up in Minneapolis, in an unobservant household, and he considers it part of his childhood. “I remember the lights, the trees,” he used to say to my little sister and me. “It was magical.” He decorates the mantel with Christmas cards and tapes mistletoe to the doorways, and one year he even tried to get my mother, also Jewish, with a much more observant upbringing, to allow an evergreen wreath on our front door. “I can’t live with that,” she said. “I just can’t. Nothing on the outside of this house. We’re Jews, for Christ’s sake.”

We were Jews who went to temple on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and who also hid Easter eggs. We lighted the Hanukkah candles every night for eight nights — This was the oil, this was the fight for freedom — and then Santa came later in the month.

The year I was 8, I begged for a dog for Hanukkah or Christmas or both. My parents kept resisting, until at last they offered a compromise: something smaller, a hamster maybe, or a gerbil. Finally, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, my mother drove me to the pet shop, where I spotted a calico guinea pig: black with bits of orange, some white.

The woman smiled at us. “Why not take a few days to make sure it’s exactly what you want.”

“It is!” I said. “It is exactly!”

“Actually,” the clerk said, “since Christmas is such a chaotic time, we never let them go on Christmas Eve.”

“Not in our house it isn’t,” my mother lied. “We’re Jewish.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “Well, then I suppose it should be fine.”

“Really,” my mother said. “Christmas Eve is nothing in our house.”

I named him GP, for guinea pig, on the way home. My mother helped me move the record player off the table across from my bed to make room for his cage. Then I lay back, my hands clasped behind my head, watching GP rut in his sawdust, and I thought I’d never have to feel alone.

That night we did what I once thought all Jews did: we prepared for Christmas. While GP stirred upstairs — “He’s tired, sweetie,” my mother assured me. “A lot went on today” — my father made a fire and read “The Night Before Christmas” aloud. And then we all went to the kitchen to sing songs ... on top of the refrigerator. This was a special holiday version of a strange and, looking back, dangerous family tradition. On other days, my father placed my sister and me on top of the fridge and we all sang “La Marseillaise,” holding our hands to our foreheads like sailors. I was too big to stand now, and so I sat, legs dangling over the mustard-colored freezer section, as my pigtailed sister and I belted out “Jingle Bells” and other favorites.

But even then we weren’t done. “Let’s hang the stockings!” my father said.

I remember my mother’s angry face, how it turned away to disconnect herself from this tradition that she didn’t want, that was not ours. She’d had enough. And as she turned, my father went to grab her arm, tenderly, to bring her back into the fray of our family, so that he was turned away as well when my sister, thrilled at the idea of the stockings, walked right off the refrigerator and slammed her chin on the kitchen floor.

There was screaming and yelling and crying and phone-calling. As my mother rushed to change out of her robe, my father carried my sister down to the garage. I stayed on top of the refrigerator, looking down on it all, remembering our promise to the lady at the pet store, who said it would be O.K. to take my guinea pig home. We lied to her about Christmas Eve. And now I wanted desperately to stay with him. But it was more than that: I wanted, for the first time in my life, to be me, separate from them.

Of course, I couldn’t really stay behind, and they dragged me with them in the Volare to the emergency room, filled with people injured on the holiday that my father so badly wanted to make his own. My sister got 12 stitches on her chin.

Two years later, when I finally got my dog, I donated GP to our school. We continued to celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah and all the Jewish holidays, and my parents gave me many gifts, but none of them were about what being Jewish really meant. Our Jewishness was everything my family was not: quiet, unexpressed, easy to shed. I would have to work to find mine in other ways.